One subject I'm always interested in reading about is bellydance, and I've read plenty of non-fiction on this topic over the years. I've also kept my eye out for bellydance fiction, but there's not much available (not that I would expect otherwise; it's a very specific niche). I passed up on reading a comic romance novel (since I don't normally read romance novels) called "Bad Girls Don't" a few years ago that had a bellydancer on the cover; based on the reader reviews on Amazon, the heroine's profession as a part-time bellydance teacher doesn't seem to be an important part of the book.
Last year another romance novel, "The Belly Dancer" by first-time author DeAnna Cameron, caught my eye. It takes place during the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago where Middle Eastern dancers introduced the U.S. public to what would eventually evolve into American cabaret-style bellydance. Despite the anachronistic cover, where the dancer is wearing a modern-day costume, I decided to give this one a chance (although it took me over a year after I bought it before I finally read it).
So what I got was - a romance novel; not a bodice-ripper, but lots of lavish descriptions of "dresses and tresses" at the expense of character development. The plot description from Publisher's Weekly is as follows: Newlywed Dora Chambers goes to great lengths to keep her banker husband, Charles, happy, even ingratiating herself with a dreadful group of snotty socialites who oversee the decorum of the fair's more exotic exhibits, like the popular Egyptian belly dancing attraction. Dora is given the task of toning down the Egyptian dancers' act, strikes up a friendship with the troupe, and together they appease the outraged female population by modifying their dance and adding scarves to disguise their curves. Dora's husband, impatient with her virginal fear of the marriage bed, quickly resumes relations with his powerful and rich mistress, a widow who despises Dora and knows the secrets that can ruin Dora's social standing.
The best part of the novel is Dora's developing friendship with one of the dancers, Amina, a bold young woman not afraid to speak her mind, and who agrees to teach Dora how to dance and to be seductive, as Dora attempts to win her husband back from his mistress. Here we get a little history about the Egyptian dancers as well as some flavor of the fair itself. We also begin to see sparks fly between Dora and Hossam, the dance troupe's handsome Egyptian manager. While I didn't find Dora's growing assimilation into the dancers' lives all that realistic, it was entertaining from the point of view of a fan of bellydance.
Unfortunately, the characters outside of Dora are poorly developed; the husband's mistress, especially, comes off as a cardboard villain. And Dora herself is a bit too much of a sad-sack; she goes from a lonely, unhappy childhood in New Orleans to a lonely, unhappy marriage - all the better to make her empowerment more inspiring, I guess, but it doesn't help endear one to her. And if the reader hasn't guessed Dora's "dark secret" by about page 35, she just isn't trying.
So, would I recommend this book? Romance-novel fans will enjoy it (nearly all of the 14 customer reviews on Amazon gave the book four or five stars, and the plot would fit right in with those Lifetime Channel movies that I was subjected to over the holiday weekend, so there's certainly an audience for this sort of thing). For the rest of us, if you're in the mood for a "bellydance novel," you can take this book for what it is, and enjoy the peek inside the "dancer's tent," at least.
